Hank Stuever

To do real justice to “Game of Thrones,” I’d have to quit my job and tackle those 4,000 or so unread pages of George R.R. Martin’s series of five fantasy novels on which the finely crafted HBO series is based. There just isn’t that sort of time in my sort of world. “Game of Thrones,” which begins its third season at 10 p.m. today, is like no other TV show around right now — brilliant, exasperating, enthralling, and, if you let it become so, hard work.

It’s rare that I want take-backs as a critic, but it still pains me to encounter my first “Game of Thrones” review in the archives, in which I was too dismissive of the show when it began in 2011. I was right about a couple of things — “Game of Thrones” is and always will be a tad supercilious — and wrong about what I perceived to be its barrier to entry, which only revealed my bias against the tropes of fantasy. (Swords, dragons, castles, women as subservient wenches, etc.)

One girds oneself for some serious hammer time when an opening fight scene of History’s compelling and robust new drama series, “Vikings,” delivers all the expected gore and blood spatter.

Yet, beyond its blunt-force trauma, “Vikings” (premiering at 11 p.m. today) turns out to be an adroit and even elegant surprise, simply by aping some of the basic skills of a successful cable drama. The care shown for its dialogue and acting gives it “Sons of Anarchy’s” sense of scope, while the 1,200-year dial-back lends it a dash of “Game of Thrones’s” medieval mood. And a relatively modest budget keeps “Vikings” honest, in a “Spartacus” way, as a caution for those tempted to take it too seriously.

You know the drill: Something goes wrong and most everyone dies, but not the pretty people, who are left to congregate in dystopian survival, their days lived out as a series of cliff-hanging tests of character. Because of our mutual paranoia that the things we love most cannot possibly last — America, the Constitution, gasoline, temperate weather, Medicare — the preferred storytelling genre so far in the 21st century has been all-apocalypse, all the time. As a compelling backdrop, the end of the world is hard to beat.

Empathy for supermodels isn’t easy to muster, especially when their idea of suffering and personal travail seems so exquisite and remote.

Photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ film “About Face: Supermodels Then and Now” (airing Monday night on HBO) attempts to bridge some of the chasm between these famous beauties and the rest of us. The filmmaker hunts down several of the biggest names in modeling from decades ago to collect their thoughts on the profession and discover how they’ve dealt with the inevitabilities of age. There are some tender moments and honest reflections.